You just very clearly identified sonething that I have spent the past decade suppressing being annoyed about in our shared car.

Uber is too expensive these days

That was always the goal. Uber and Lyft prices were heavily subsidized early on. Their investors poured billions into them in order to not just establish market share, but tk drive existing taxi services out of business. Taxi services that had things like: fleets of company-owned vehicles instead of personal vehicles, commercials grade maintenance schedules, stricter licensing requirements for drivers, unionized employees instead of independent contractors, etc

Uber and Lyft just plain ignored a lot of existing regulations by saying "those don't apply because this is an app" to legislators who were too old to know how to turn on a smart phone. They got the public on-board by temporarily offering artificially low prices and high payouts to drivers. Now they have established themselves and removed the competition, so the payouts are going down and the prices are going up.

There are still some US cities that do not allow Uber or Lyft to operate, and there are other countries in the world that do the same.

How were they broken?

Maybe my memory is different, but I recall Infinite being extremely well-received at the time. Much better than Fallout 4 was. Like, it was talked about as being one of the greatest games of all-time.

Rather, I think its a rare case where public opinion sours over time. Part of that is because the game itself really doesn't hold up to being replayed. The best part of the game is the story, and mostly because of the sense of mystery that pulls the player forward and leads up the the big twist reveal at the end. In a lot of media like that, its really fun to go back and are all of the little pieces of foreshadowing that you overlook or misinterpret the first time. Or heck, maybe some people pick up on it and predict the ending, and that can also be incredibly satisfying. But Infinite doesn't have any of that. When I replayed Infinite a couple years ago, I got to the ending thinking "yeah there was absolutely no way I woukd have been able to figure that out on my own the first time", which was really unsatisfying.

Not only that, by parts of the story are actively bad when you stop to think about it. There was the whole arc where they go to a different dimension where Daisy is leading a revolt against Comstock and she just kind of decides for no reason that Booker is an enemy who has to die. It really felt like they just ran out of ideas to make the enemies you had been fighting up until then visually interesting so they tried to cram in a different faction somehow. The scene where Elizabeth sneaks up on Daisy and kills her with a pair of scissors to the neck felt incredibly out of character and unearned. There were moments during the revolt sequence when Booker acts sickened by the violence against Comstock's soldiers, though he never reacted like that to those soldiers oppressing civilians earlier in the game.

Some of it is cultural context too. Fascism has been on the rise globally since the game has come out, so I think a lot of the audience (myself included) is less interested in condemning the oppressed for violence against their oppressors than they may have been at the time of release. When you put it next to BioShock 1, it seems like Ken Levine is just using political extremism in general as a narrative device for conflict rather than actually trying to make any particular statement about politics. That kind of centrism has not aged well.

Without that, the rest of the game falls apart. The peaceful segments are good additions for the sake of pacing, but the NPC's don't really interact with you much and are more just scenery. They aren't people that you ever care about, so changing the world state to the violent one where you're shooting enemies never feels all that meaningful.

The action sequences are okay, but not good enough to stand the game up on its own like some of its contemporaries did. Games like Uncharted and Assassin's Creed have their own issues of course, but it was really fun to just run around as Ezio or Drake in most of the games in a way that it never was for Booker. The enemies in Infinite feel repetetive, almost every "arena room" area feels the same. The guns aren't that interesting and the gimmick of the vigors wears off quickly. Elizabeth isn't all that interesting in combat, just an occasional extra source of health or ammo. The time rifts are basically the same. The sky hook was cool, but wasn't used often and there wasn't usually much of a benefit to being airborne vs grounded anyways.

So the only thing left to really enjoy is the spectacle. It still looks good. The art style is a great balance between realism and stylized that looked great at the time and has aged well. The sound is all good- voice acting, sound effects, music, all of it. The setting and environments are creative and interesting.

So I'd say it is worth playing once for most people, but doesn't live up to its Metacritic score. In tier terms, it seemed upon release like an S-tier game but has aged into more of a B-tier.

I've had so many friends, family, and coworkers go on resort vacations and cruises. Almost always their reviews are incredibly positive. Most of them go back and do it again and again every year, or more. And yet, everything they describe sounds absolutely awful to me.

The other half of my polycule went on a cruise earlier this year, and in all of their text updates about meeting new peooek and doing a lot of novel structures activities on the boat it was really hard for me tl be enthusiastic and supportive about them enjoying what sounds like hell to me. They seem to be trying to convince my wife and I to join them one year.

They also recently went to Vegas and... Wow I can't think of any city I woukd ever want to visit less. So of course we did already agree to join them on their annual trip next year. I'm already dreading it. Currently I'm on a break from weed to clear my head and deal with things, and I want to generally be sober when I deal with the outside world, but I suspect I will spend a lot of that trip stoned. My wife and I already talked about trying to find a library or somewhere to chill while our bf and gf get their dopamine hits from the slot machines.

At a recent family gathering, we talked about traveling and my (also autistic) sister said that she likes to go visit new cities, but prefers to do it alone. No friends, no husband, no children. She wants to be able to wander without being concerned about anyone else's wants or needs. That has stuck in my mind ever since.

For me its a spectrum, making my own judgment for each piece of media.

Copyright laws in the US have changed a lot over the last century, largely due to regulatory capture. The older versions of copyright law are mostly around 14-28 years after creation and those seem fair to me. So I don't feel bad about anything >30 years old.

Another factor is the sliding spectrum between art as an altruistic creative experience versus art as a capitalist product created by gigantic corporations. Heavily monetized art tends to be stuff I enjoy less anyways so this kind of filters itself out. Its all formulaic and trend-chasing, largely the made by the same small group of people and rebranded with different faces. If I do ever want big-budget, mainstream content I don't feel bad about not paying for it.

Sometimes its about convenience. There are a handful of creators still on YouTube that I like, and one of these days I want to get around to setting up yt-dlp and adding their channels to my Jellyfin to get around all the terrible ads of the platform, but I'll probably buy some merch or throw them some money on Patreon or whatever to try to compensate for it. I also prefer to buy CD's and merch from bands at their live shows where a higher % of the proceeds goes to the artist.

OnlyFans has "strict onboarding processes, payment controls and ongoing account moderation", the company spokesperson says. If concerns about an account are raised, OnlyFans will immediately restrict the account, investigate, and take action to ensure the creator is in control of their account, they added.

But when a female BBC reporter set up an account with a verified photo, she was able to use a male colleague's bank account details to receive test payments.

OnlyFans told the BBC that: "In the UK, where a creator requests a payout from their OnlyFans accounts, our third-party payment providers undertake confirmation of payee checks when processing that payment. Where this check is not successful the payment will be rejected."

That's kind of vague, but it seems like the BBC is just expecting some sort of magical, privacy-invading, AI facial scanning technology to happen. I would not expect a photo to be involved with any payment processing at all. If I sell something on eBay do I need a photo ID to get my money? If I sell anything anywhere else, or start my own business with my own website, or my friends and family just want to send me money, do I need to have a photo and facial recognition every time?

And OnlyFans points to their 3rd party payment processors. OnlyFans isn't in the business of processing payments- that is outsourced like almost every other business does too. And there are perfectly legitimate reasons why a model might want those payments to go to someone else. There are legitimate agents and agencies.

I've seen predictions of Firefox's downfall for decades. Still waiting for it to happen.

It's really easy to see the headlines saying things like "Firefox is tracking it's users and violating their privacy!!!" And panic. But digging into the latest "scandal" (the PPA), it seems like Firefox is behaving pretty reasonably.

One of the main criticisms is that it's opt-out instead of opt-in. Which... I kind of agree with Mozilla on. 99% of users aren't going to know or care about this, and the 1% that do are the kind of people who probably would have extensions to disable it or just use some obscure ultra-private browser instead.

I don't fault NOYB for bringing it up either. It's good to have organizations like that keeping an eye out for everyone.

But I also get worried that sometimes communies attack their closest allies for being imperfect harder than enemies actively working against their interests.

I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but the Biden administration has really exceeded my expectations.

"No touchscreen" is a really great selling point imo

“The whole thing is screwed up,” said John Painter, a three-time Trump voter who runs an organic dairy farm in Westfield. “We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do.”

What wages are you offering? Perhaps you are the one who has been spoiled by cheap labor.

“We moved to H-2A out of necessity,” added Sarah Zost, an orchard grower in Gardners, Pennsylvania. “No one wants to use the program. It’s a paperwork nightmare.”

So it's fine to require these immigrants to jump through all sorts of hoops and navigate the beauracracy, but for these poor American farmers running businesses it's simply too much to ask.

The cognitive dissonance with these fools is astounding.

Here's his voting record in the Senate.

Seems like he's the politician I thought he'd be on like 99% of the issues. But if we want to book down an entire politician's record to just one issue, sure.

For decades, weed’s deleterious health effects were exaggerated, experts said, leading to excessive criminalization

This line fron the article is exactly why I'm skeptical. I had to sit through tons of middle school and high school programs that lied to me about the physiological effects of marijuana. This article itself opens with an anecdote about one individual, but fails to identify any academic study suggesting physiological addiction because... There is none.

Psychological addiction is real. There's a reason that in most places any gambling advertisements have to include a warning and a hotline. The problem is that these sensationalist articles never make the distinction between psychological and physiological addiction. This article mentions when the case study first tried marijuana, but fails to detail the circumstances of her life, her personality, and other factors that can contribute to psychological addiction.

Add in that the medical marijuana industry is trying to replace the very physiological addictive (and profitable) pain medications... Add that to the years of lies in schools and media... Forgive me for not trusting this BS at all.

For those who don't want to read several pages of unnecessary text telling you what you probably already know:

The math, while pretty involved, may tell a straightforward story (if you’re interested in the details of our analysis, see the Appendix). OpenAI has contracted 900K memory wafers per month from Samsung and SK Hynix. Partner commentary seems to indicate that’s a monthly number, so that represents 10.8 million wafers over 12 months. In terms of demand, a fully built-out 10GW Stargate cluster would require 3 million GB200 Bianca Boards. Each board requires ~50% of a memory wafer in total; split between the HBM3e stacks embedded into its two B200 GPU (30%) and its 480 GB of LPDDR5X system memory (~20%). That puts total wafer demand for the entire cluster at ~3 million wafers.

Therefore, according to our best estimates, OpenAI likely needs less than 30% of the 10.8 million wafers it's planning to buy

So this is just putting some numbers to what a lot of people already guessed. The AI companies are not just buying a ton of RAM to build out their data centers. They aren't buying enough other components to even use that RAM. They're buying it so that no one else can.

I got a lot of downvotes on Reddit for pointing out that there's no scientific evidence supporting porn addiction. It's just the latest version of religious indoctrination. ISIS was using that as part of their recruitment process: men who are sexually repressed are easier for them to manipulate.

For further context, the US population is estimated to be around 340 million.

They are advocating for deporting nearly 1/3rd of the country. Absolutely insane.

That is basically why the Standard Deduction exists.

people put off buying homes and other big purchases because they know it will be cheaper later

What absolute drivel. This myth was obviously formulated by some wealthy economist who had only ever worries about purchasing vacation homes.

People put off buying homes UNTIL THEY CAN AFFORD IT. How many people does the author think are currently in the streets or renting for years just so they can save a bit on their mortgage? Completely garbage.

Innocent?

If they are innocent, how would releasing the document destroy them?

Kind of gross how this article seems to be trying at every turn to say, "no ai is actually good! It helped us catch the bad businessmen that happen to be in the AI industry!" By focusing on a tiny trading period on November 20th.

Because I remember casually watching Hank Green talk about this same thing more than a month earlier.

Hank Green isn't a finance bro or an AI guy or even really a tech guy. He's just a guy reacting to things that are trending, and I remember I had seen the main graphic he was talking about floating around the internet for a while before I watched the video. People have been calling AI a "bubble" for much longer.

I am old enough to remember the report that 95% of generative AI companies failed to see returns from using it. That was back in August.

I don't like giving credit to "trading algorithms" for things that humans figured out a long time ago.